Only With Open Hearts And Minds Can We Strive For Equality For All Americans

August 21, 1995|MYRIAM MARQUEZ Orlando Sentinel

When I was 6, I learned to fear black men.

When I was 8, I learned to judge not by the color of a person's skin, but by the content of his character.

When I was 13, I learned to hate bigots. At 25, I learned to forgive them.

Each one of us views our world through a very individual and subjective prism, one that reflects the joys and the frustrations of past experiences. My prism can't deny the racial - and to a lesser extent, the sexual - divide that persists in this country. Maybe yours can.

Here's why mine can't: My early fear of black men grew out of a horrible killing I witnessed at age 6. My mother and I were at a Laundromat across the street from a hardware store. Suddenly, we heard a loud bang. We saw a young black man, carrying a gun, run out of the store.

The gun blast had killed the store owner, a kindly white American whom my parents had befriended. The bullet had exploded through his head and gone past the store's plate-glass window. His brain, his hair, his face, all laid on the sidewalk.

Black men are evil, my 6-year-old brain surmised from that terrible tragedy.

Two years later, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. entered my young life through the TV. As I watched the rainbow of people in Washington, who gathered for miles to hear King's "I Have a Dream" speech and heard his cry for racial equality, I realized that most black people weren't criminals. They were law-abiding, working people. Good people. It was a lesson reinforced at school by a caring white woman who became one of my favorite teachers.

At 13, I experienced the type of verbal harassment and ethnic hatred that African Americans painfully have had to endure throughout history.

My Cuban family had just moved to a new neighborhood, next to a white, American family. One day, my puppy got out of our fenced yard and started chewing up my neighbor's flower bed.

"Get that goddamn Cuban son of a bitch outta here," the agitated fellow yelled at me, as if only dogs belonging to Cuban families ever tore into other people's yards. I hated that man for thinking that way.

It's said that time heals all wounds. And at 25, my time came. I was visiting my parents' home, when the old neighbor, very sick with emphysema, came by to say hello to me. When he left, I asked my mother, "What happened to the old, crotchety bigot?''

She answered, "Oh, he's past all that. We're friends now. He has even learned a few words in Spanish."

Now at 40, I know I still have much to learn about what unites Americans as a people and what will tear us apart. That there is racism, sexism, agism, nativism, you-name-it-ism ripping apart this country is nothing new in our nation's history.

Many of you might say, "That's all in the past. Stop dwelling on the negative. Look around you and see the diversity of races and ethnicities. See the progress of women and men working together. Delight in the accomplishments. Stop whining."

No doubt I would live nowhere else. I love this great country. I will not, however, put blinders on and comfortably lock out everybody else who is different, as so many people seem to be doing in the national debate over affirmative-action programs.

Equal opportunity and fairness for all Americans is the ideal. It is not yet our reality. A white man who has been denied a job because of "reverse" discrimination shouldn't be ignored. Neither should a minority or a woman who has been treated unfairly.

Whether our individual prisms will let us achieve the ideal, with or without affirmative action, is this nation's greatest challenge. Unless we open our hearts and our minds to our humanity as people first, we will be lost in a dark sea of suspicion and hatred - unable to see the light of understanding that strains to shine through the prisms of our lives.